Beta Testing

Whoa, found this today and it brought back a bunch of memories.

Back in 2000? during Napster's heyday there was a copy of Daft Punk's soon to be released new album floating around the P2P sites. Buzz of Discovery was all over the place. (Remember, all we had before this was Homework and Music Sounds Better With You. No robots, just a couple of guys in dog masks.) I am pretty sure One More Time was already out and you know how big that track blew up. Suffice to say people were eager to hear what the duo was putting out next.

So a couple of pranksters did what was pretty popular at the time of dial-up connections, take the tracklist of an upcoming album and replace the music with alternative songs. I know I shouldn't have been frustrated for waiting 3 hours a download of a free album but when it is not what you're expecting, well you get "annoyed".

Honestly, when I downloaded this album, it was the opposite. Some of the stuff didn't sound like Daft Punk but there were enough bits and pieces of the new album to make it believable.

Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger.... W.O.W. Nothing sounded like it (not even a Kanye West song!). And it wasn't even the full version (some extended mix by an unknown Djnikkolechinois). High Life, Voyager, Veridis Quo share elements of their proper release. Then there was the Pierre Stupide track. Horribly recorded, but genuinly interesting. You kinda figured it was part of a bigger whole. Once the album was exposed a fake. 1My next mission was to find out who some of the original artists were. Particular who was behind Pierre Stupide. There had to be a better "original version" on somebod'sy hard drive. But all I had to search on was the title "Pierre Stupide" who was the artist? Back then Alta Vista though it returned a lot of "hits" was limited and Hot Bot wasn't much better.

Nowadays, a quick Google search gives you (gave me) the history of the song. DJ Fistfunk, born in Lier is a natural born music addict and was the creative brain behind "Pierre Stupide", a "Napster-Prank" set up in August, 2000. One day, he was bored and ended up mashing some random samples... added some effects, and shared it out to the Napster as:

"daft punk (new album 2000 promo) - pierre stupide.mp3"

Remember this was 2000, the word 'blog' didn't even exist. So the joke just took a life of it's own. It ended up getting reviewed, played out on some radios and even mentioned in a Mixmag article. To further add to the confusion, in an interview with NME, Daft Punk commented, "Who says it's fake?" Some lucky Italians even got a chance to pick it up on a white label with One More Time on the a-side.

Check out more of Fistfunk's mashups (is that a dirty word?) at his MySpace profile.

So here is the only released version of Pierre Stupide. In the spirit of Napster, I'll keep it labeled as Daft Punk.

The best part of this was built into Napster was a chat function. That was basically how word of the genuineness of the album spread. So like the person that told me, I told the next person that was downloading from me. 8 years late we're still great friends and I hopefully will meet his brother who is in town next week for Art Basel. Oh and the coolest thing was he lives in Berlin and would send over music they were listening to over there and vice versa.

Fistfunk, let me tell you I hunted EVERYWHERE for information on that track when I first heard it. I guess I had to wait 8 years until Google grew up to find out it was you. Do you any new tracks you are working on?